1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to User-Created Content (UCC), and in particular to a system and method for producing and distributing an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) for the UCC.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typical broadcast systems (i.e. service providers) provide content to subscribers. Commercial content producers typically produce the content provided to the subscribers of the broadcast systems. In order for a subscriber to locate content that is of interest to the subscriber, the service provider provides the subscriber with an Electronic Program Guide (EPG). The EPG contains information describing the content, for example, viewing times, length of content, if content is downloadable and if so, a Uniform Resource Link (URL) of the content, the names or entities that produced the content, copyright information, etc. The commercial content producers typically provide the copyright information and/or security mechanisms with the commercial content to protect the content from unlawful use. The service providers broadcast the commercial content along with the copyright information and/or security mechanisms to ensure that the commercial content is protected from unlawful uses. A content user would normally consult the EPG to locate content and then request the content from the service provider.
With the onset of advanced personal media technology, non-commercial content producers are producing non-commercial content, commonly referred to as User-Created Content (UCC). UCC is generally produced for sharing amongst individual users for non-commercial purposes. Generally, non-commercial content producers (i.e. UCC producers) create UCC without any identifying information, thus when an EPG is generated, the UCC will not have any descriptive information associated therewith. Current service providers do not distinguish between the commercial content and UCC when gathering and distributing the various content. Thus, unless a producer of the UCC is knowledgeable enough to produce the UCC to contain copyright information and/or security mechanisms, the UCC will be distributed without any identifying information. Thus, a content user would have difficulty in locating interesting UCC, and since the EPG would not contain information identifying the owner of the UCC, the UCC could be subject to uses that are beyond the intent of the UCC producer.
One current method of identifying and managing content is through the use of metadata. Metadata is commonly referred to as data about data, and can be data, in any format (e.g. voice, text, image, etc.), that describes the content. For example, metadata can provide the content name, the content size, the data format of the content, the data structure of the content, etc. Metadata is currently used to identify all types of content including images, text, video, web pages, and the like. Many EPG systems incorporate at least some of the metadata supplied with the content into the EPG to facilitate searching and identifying content.
As the amount of content being provided by service providers increases, new technology is being developed to facilitate the collection and distribution thereof. Web 2.0 is one such new technology being utilized to collect and distribute UCC over the Internet. However, with the vast increase in the amount of UCC available on the Internet, it is becoming more and more difficult to search for user-specific content.
In addition, although UCC distribution is rapidly increasing, there are no standards to protect the copyright and usage rights of the UCC. Thus, the current state of UCC distribution lends itself to unlawful distribution and postings of UCC, along with great difficulty in maintaining proprietary rights connected with the UCC.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a standard to collect and distribute UCC, and a need for a standard to protect the proprietary rights of UCC.